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EnvyCasts: Entertaining Rails Screencasts

EnvyCasts is the latest venture by the presenters of the popular Rails Envy podcast - Jason Seifer and Gregg Pollack. Like PeepCode, EnvyCasts follows a model of offering an instructional video and supporting materials on a single topic for $9 in a variety of formats (QuickTime, Ogg Theora, and iPhone/iPod).

The first release is Advanced ActiveRecord - an entertaining walkthrough of several ActiveRecord-related situations such as loading large data sets (their solution yielding a significant speed boost over the standard technique), counter caching, polymorphic associations, and single table inheritance. A video preview is available at the site.

If the first screencast is indicative of EnvyCasts' ongoing style, you can expect an irreverent and non standard but highly memorable form of tuition. Unlike with other Rails screencasts I've seen, Gregg and Jason actually appear within the frame all the time, and a lot of light-hearted banter goes on between the two. Interludes also occur where Gregg Pollack walks you through miscellaneous information about the human brain. Separate to these parlor games, however, the topic-based knowledge is relayed in a very easy to learn, memorable style. If things like cheat sheets, drawings, mnemonics and other such tools help you to learn things, Jason and Gregg's style could be just what you need in order to learn some pretty deep Rails knowledge.

As an aside, the EnvyCasts site appears to be powered by Spree, an open source e-commerce platform for Rails. I hadn't heard of Spree before, so it might get some extra attention here on Rails Inside soon.